Growing up, Tomas Summers Sandoval was surrounded by veterans of the Vietnam War: His father and uncle and neighbors served proudly, the survivors returning to start families in the working-class suburbs of Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Valley and the Inland Empire

But outside his social circle, Summers Sandoval was dismayed to find very little has been done to document the impact of the war on Latino communities.

This month, 50 years since U.S. troops set foot in Vietnam, Summers Sandoval has found himself face to face with these men as they tell their stories.

“To understand Latinos in California, how they found their way into the military is a window to understanding the educational inequalities in society of the time,” the soft-spoken Summers Sandoval said.

A history professor at Pomona College, Summers Sandoval is researching the Latino experience in Vietnam and plans to calculate the casualties of Latinos in the war, teaming up with economics professor Fernando Lozano to get those figures. He is working with students to review large data sets from the Census and other federal surveys to determine the number of Latinos that fought in the war.

“We have to think about Vietnam as more than just creating an anti-war movement in Chicano communities — which it did and was very important. I think far more families were affected in ways beyond participation (in the protests),” he said.

Knowing those stories is vital, said Summers Sandoval, who teaches a class devoted to compiling oral histories of Latino and Chicano Vietnam veterans.

According to his research, Latinos did indeed bear a heavy burden. Latinos made up 11 percent of the population during the war, but 14 percent of the Vietnam casualties were Latinos.

“Now that we have final numbers — what is the participation rate of Latinos in the Vietnam war,” he said. “Were we more overrepresented in our population in deaths?”

New data shows that many more families have a direct connection to those who served in Vietnam than to the Chicano youth activism of that time, he said.

A ‘surplus population’

In the dozens of interviews Summers Sandoval has conducted over the past four years, he has come to believe the war had a profound effect on the Southland’s Latino population.

Latinos, many from East Los Angeles and other parts of working-class L.A., shouldered a heavy, disproportionate burden in the war, he said. Those who came back alive changed communities and affected how Southern California neighborhoods looked. Many migrated eastward into the San Gabriel Valley, turning up in places like La Puente and all those other towns, which become what Summers Sandoval coined “brown suburbs”.

There’s the serviceman who experienced tragedy after coming home from war, the one who went on to become a probation officer and another whose treatment after returning from the conflict inspired him to be an advocate for all veterans.

They’re men like Luis Ramirez. In 1966, he was 19 years old and purposelessly attending East Los Angeles College. Ramirez, who lived in Lincoln Heights with his family, admitted he didn’t pay close attention to the conflict overseas.

If he got drafted, he got drafted, Ramirez recounted.

That tall and lanky 140-pound teenager who went to war is now 67, with white strands surrounding the frame of his face.

“We looked at our uncles and the older generation of World War II veterans,” said Ramirez, who served as a radio operator calling airstrikes for the Vietnamese infantry he was assigned to near the Mekong Delta. “I think our mentality was ‘Hey, our country needs us, we’ve got to go in.’ I didn’t realize I would end up in a war situation.”

Many dropped out of college and got picked up in the draft. Others, despite being enrolled in college, didn’t put in for deferments because they figured they would eventually serve anyway, Summers Sandoval said.

“A lot of them are men, in any other generation, who would have wanted to be put into college,” he said. “They are graduating and going off to war. In a way, they were this surplus population that the military was waiting to pick up.”

Ramirez’ mix of pride and resignation was shared by many others in that period, Summers Sandoval said.

Howard Hernandez grew up in the city of Commerce, and he recalls more than 150 classmates, mostly Latinos, who either enlisted or were drafted.

“We had a great deal of pride and we’re Americans,” said Hernandez, who now lives in Montebello. “I thought it was every male’s responsibility to serve in the military.”

The brunt

They paid a heavy price, one that Summers Sandoval continues to tally.

Much has been documented about the anti-war Chicano movement, but rarely has there been discussion about the disproportionate number of Latinos and Chicanos who served – according to previous surveys and even in Summers Sandoval’s research — and who were casualties of the war, Summers Sandoval said.

Documenting the stories of veterans such as Ramirez has also been a way to hone in on just how much of the war’s burden California’s Latino veterans bore.

It hasn’t been easy.

“Through the Vietnam War, Latinos are not counted separately, and so they are folded into the white population,” he said. “There’s no easy way to retrieve data about how many were Latinos and how many causalities were Chicano and Latino.”

Political scientist Ralph Guzman, who taught at Cal State L.A. and UC Santa Cruz, was among the few researchers to delve into the issue of how many Latinos served. Guzman did what Summers Sandoval described as important research on Spanish surname analysis of the war’s casualty reports.

Guzman released his findings in 1969, and Summers Sandoval still leans on it in his studies. And that’s where he finds the burdens that Latinos shouldered during the war.

Latinos represented 19.4 percent of deaths, but were 11 percent of the population of the southwestern U.S., Summers Sandoval said, referring to the work of Guzman, who died in 1988.

Guzman’s research was one of the catalysts for the Chicano anti-war movement. But there was a caveat. Guzman’s numbers took into account only the three deadliest years of the war. And that’s where Summers Sandoval has taken the baton. His research will span the entire war, and as part of his oral history projects, he continues to sift through the data and is planning a book to be finished next year.

‘How fortunate we are’

Ramirez went to basic training with three classmates from his high school, and lost seven to eight from his graduating class during the war, he said.

Ramirez said his experience in the military gave his life more structure and taught him to be more responsible.

“It helped me to do things in life,” he said. “It’s also made me realize what I have in the world and how fortunate we are. What we have is freedom.”

For 39 years, he has lived in El Sereno, a community in East Los Angeles, with his wife Mary Ellen, and raised four children. He eventually graduated from college, and after more than three decades in information technology, he retired. Today he teaches part-time at East Los Angeles College.

For Manuel Sandoval, Summers Sandoval’s uncle, serving in the Marines was unlike any other life lesson he had before being drafted at 19 years old. Returning from service was like returning to a different world.

“I felt like people who were here were kids,” he said. “My friends who hadn’t gone, seemed to me childish. They were more into the party scene — this is, again, when I came back in 1967. I felt like I was much older and more mature, maybe I wasn’t, but that’s how I felt.”

Perceptions. Feelings. They are going into the stories that Summers Sandoval is archiving with the Library of Congress.

To help find those voices, he is working with his students at Pomona College to gather the histories.

“We have a history, community history, but more specifically we have a history inside of the military,” he said. “We can talk about making sacrifices — people who are still alive and participated in this war from our community. If we don’t record those stories, those stories die with them.”

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